Consumer Driven Health Care (CDHC) policies have been developed for employees of companies, individuals and groups (collectively “Insureds”) for obtaining health-care services in a manner that the underwriting insurers can be assured that these Insureds are obtaining economically reasonable health-care services and not needlessly overpaying for them. Typically, these policies contain a high-deductible. Thus, they require the Insureds to obtain quotes from more than one service provider to obtain the best value. However, many Insureds have found it very difficult to find the needed health-care information.
To meet the needs of the growing number of Insureds that are covered by defined contribution approaches or CDHC policies, insurers have increased the amount of information that is available on web-based tools. These web-based tools provide the Insureds with quickly accessible information that they can use for obtaining and evaluating health insurance policies, health-care providers, and related health-care services. The information that these insurers provide may be slanted beneficially on behalf of the insurers because they can control the amount and content of the information that is posted on these web-based tools. Accordingly, the Insureds have no assurance that the information is objective and consider their interests.
There are a number of reasons why the Insureds should not feel any comfort in the information that is provided by the insurers. One is that the insurers are unlikely to provide information that conflicts with their business interests, namely to maximize the return to their investors and minimize the amount paid out in claims. Therefore, information made available to the Insureds from insurer controlled web-based tools should not be felt to be particularly reliable from the Insureds' of view. As such, the Insureds must take actions to verify the information that is insurer provided. One such course of action when the information is mistrusted is to obtain a second opinion. Another action is to do extensive research when an enrollee feels that the insurer-provided information is simply not enough for the Insured to make a decision based on such information.
Insureds would prefer to have needed information available from a number of independent sources so that they can make judicious comparisons of health insurance policies, health-care providers, and related health-care services, and the costs and/or prices associated with each of them. In the past, the sources of such information were not in any type of central depository where it could be readily obtained and compared. All that was available to the Insureds were pieces of information at disparate locations, which had to be somehow found and amassed to assist them to make health-care decisions. Therefore, unless the Insureds had a great deal of time and resources, integrated, relevant, and timely information was essentially unavailable to help them make health-care decisions. Noting this, it is highly desirable for there to be a single system that will make needed health-care information readily available from neutral third-party sources to assist the Insureds in making health-care decisions in an economically and judicious manner.